We think transactivists will swiftly come to see yesterday as an epic mistake.
Because it looks as though it might just have been the final straw.
The public reaction against Graham Linehan’s arrest at Heathrow Airport by five armed officers over a handful of innocuous tweets, which also saw the writer hospitalised, was so loud that it even prompted JK Rowling – who’s conspicuously never spoken up for Linehan before despite them being arguably the two biggest names in the gender-critical world, certainly in the UK – to protest.
Many more people who weren’t fans of the Father Ted creator joined in.
Incredibly, even uber-transactivist Owen Jones was peaked.
But more significantly, so was the chief of the police force that arrested Linehan.
In an absolutely extraordinary intervention, the Met’s Sir Mark Rowley bemoaned the position his officers had been put in, called on the government to change the law, and announced “a more stringent triaging process” to ensure such things didn’t happen in future – although oddly he didn’t go so far as to drop the case against Linehan.
His call immediately met a sympathetic ear in Westminster, as government minister Wes Streeting agreed that the law needed looking at.
As did the Prime Minister.
Condemnation of the arrest spanned political and geographical barriers, with MPs of almost every party united in anger (the chief exception being the new Greens leader Zack Polanski, who memorably told Radio 5’s Nicky Campbell that it shouldn’t be legal “to say you want to kick a woman in the balls”) and a slew of voices in the US and Europe joining in.
The arrest is widely believed to have been wholly or partly orchestrated by psychotic disgraced ex-policeman Lynsay Watson, with whom Wings readers will be familiar.
(And who’s at present ambitiously trying to extort £50,000 from us with a spurious County Court claim under the Equality Act 2010 for misgendering and “outing” him. Individuals are, of course, not subject to the Equality Act, only public authorities, and Watson has been openly and extremely publicly trans for at least 27 years.)
Watson gloated about the arrest extensively on dying social media network Bluesky, having recently been banned from Twitter for “doxxing” and threatening JK Rowling.
But even some in the trans community doubted the wisdom of the move.
And while it remains to be seen what actually results, to have united the Commissioner of the Met and the Prime Minister against you is a heck of an own goal in any book. Graham Linehan is actually due in court in Westminster tomorrow on ludicrous charges of assaulting a particularly obnoxious and aggressive transactivist (the reason he was at Heathrow in the first place, having moved to the US to get peace from the trans ghouls and get back to work on comedy).
We hope there’ll be a large display of public support outside the court. But in any event, maybe it’d be an idea for Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Mark Rowley to pop down and have a coffee with him afterwards. Because it really is time that transactivists’ rule of terror in the UK came to an end – along with the draconian culture of arrests over free speech generally – and it looks like something the public wants to happen with increasing urgency.
If it does, then the British public will for the first time ever have something to thank the hysterical, megalomaniacal overreach of transactivists for. Nice work, lads.
